Loyalty, Love, and Loss
by GraphiteHeron
Summary: The day starts out perfectly, better than perfectly, and ends with Alec Hawke having to say goodbye to his best friend of more than ten years.


All in all, the day starts out perfectly for Alec Hawke.

It's one of those days. Anders is, for once, fairly stable – he's had his ups and downs recently. Alec tries to be understanding, but it's still exhausting to keep up with him. Today, though, Anders is all smiles and calm energy. It's a good day.

Scout – Alec's mabari warhound – has uncharacteristically left a lamb bone un-chewed in his food dish. The loyal hound is a little slow today, but he's also somewhat grey under the muzzle. Maybe he's just not up to chewing today. He'll get to it later, when he's got more energy, Alec thinks.

Anders heads down to his clinic. Alec heads out to chat with Varric for a while. The dwarf is always good companionship. As always, Varric is up in his palatial suite of the Hanged Man, the only clean corner of the otherwise grungy tavern.

"You're chipper today, Hawke. Blondie on a good day?"

"Absolutely." Alec grins, finding a seat at the long table that dominates half of the suite. "Well enough to go down to his clinic, even. I think he wants to make up for sleeping through yesterday."

A lie, of sorts. Anders hadn't slept through yesterday. He'd merely stayed in bed, staring at the far wall. Sometimes he'd blinked, but not often.

"Good to hear. I worry about him, you know. He's really not as much fun anymore."

"I know. So, I hear you've been working on a new story."

Varric laughs and tells Alec the latest adventures of the Champion of Kirkwall. Technically, Alec is the title character – the otherwise nameless 'Hawke'. But Alec, left to his own devices, isn't altogether interesting. He sometimes does interesting things, mostly stupid things – taking on the Arishok in single combat was one of those things – but he isn't an interesting man until Varric gets to him and applies a bit of creativity. The end result is a man just close enough to be almost recognizable, but not so close that Alec feels like he's really the hero of the stories.

With the conclusion of the tale, Alec bids Varric farewell and heads back downstairs. Isabela is finally awake. Alec takes the time to check in with her, exchanging smiles and, before she can stop him, a hug.

While he's in Lowtown, Alec drops by the alienage and spends a few minutes talking with Merrill before finally heading home.

The lamb bone is still uneaten. A pinch of worry nags mildly at the back of Alec's mind. Scout never leaves bones like this. The hound himself is lying by the fireplace in the living room of the Amell estate. He tries to get up when Alec walks in, but can't quite keep control of his back legs and topples over. He gets it on the second try, but can't walk quite right.

Now Alec worries.

Scout makes it halfway across the living room before the effort of getting there exhausts him and he flops to the floor again. A thick trail of drool glitters on the floor in the firelight, and this is wrong, because Scout doesn't just drool.

Alec runs upstairs to his bedroom and rummages around the trunk of things he brought from Lothering before he finds his old baby blanket and then yanks a pillow off of his bed before running back down.

Scout is shivering. The hound flops over sideways, as if lying on his stomach is too much for him to handle. Alec slides the pillow under Scout's large head and covers him with the little blanket. Alec lies down on the floor next to Scout, curled around his best friend of more than ten years.

He kicks himself for not knowing something was wrong sooner. But that won't help. Not knowing what else to do, Alec just smooths the blanket over his dog's flank and buries his nose in the top of Scout's head.

"Hey buddy, what's wrong?"

Scout sighs, but doesn't make any of his usual dog-speak noises. His breathing is labored, uneven. Alec can feel the tears and the panic begin to well up. No. No. This can't be happening.

"Please be okay," he whispers after fifteen minutes of lying there. "Please don't leave me, Scout. Please be okay."

For two hours, they lay there, Alec stroking Scout's side and whispering what a good dog he is, always has been, please be okay. Scout manages, once, to muster up the energy to throw his head back and lick Alec's cheek before flopping back against the pillow.

Anders comes up through the cellar entrance, smile fading as soon as he sees Alec and Scout. He hurries to them, kneeling on the floor by Scout's feet, across from Alec.

"Oh, love, what's wrong?"

"I don't know," Alec chokes. He's been crying on and off, vacillating between panicking that his dog is possibly dying and hoping that Scout will be okay. "He's just…he can't get up without stumbling, walking ten feet tired him out, he's had no appetite today… What do I do?"

Anders scans the ailing hound with a brush of magic, trying to find the problem, but he shakes his head.

"Make sure he has water to drink. I'll go get Bodahn, see if we can't get something mild for him to try and eat. Stay with him, love. I'll be right back."

Sniffling, Alec hugs Scout tighter and waits. Eventually Anders returns with a bowl of water and somehow he's procured a plate of cooked chicken meat, cut into neat little cubes. Scout finally perks up, even manages to stand and walk back to the fireplace.

He drinks his water, catches bits of chicken, and Alec feels the knot of tension ease. Maybe it's just a scare. Scout looks fine. Or, if not precisely fine, at least like he's recovering. Still, Alec plans on staying up and keeping an eye on him, just in case, and says as much to Anders.

The healer nods. "Alright. He's sleeping in the bed then?" Anders doesn't sound particularly pleased – he's a cat person, not a dog person – but in this case he isn't going to begrudge Scout a comfortable place to sleep.

They lead Scout up the stairs, and while the dog's tread is slow, he's walking in a straight line. He even manages to jump up on the bed. Alec curls up around Scout, and Anders manages to squeeze himself in on the end of the bed.

Alec stays awake through the night, but Anders takes over for him at dawn, letting him get about three hours of sleep in before Scout begins to cough and bluster. The dog has turned around in the night, so when he vomits, he does so at the foot of the bed. It's a small mess for such a large hound, a puddle of bright yellow bile that Anders is immediately up to clean. It isn't as messy as the things he has to clean up in the clinic, the healer admits with a small, reassuring smile.

Although the vomiting is worrying, afterwards Scout looks like a new dog. Bright, vivacious, energetic. Alec feels the panic ebb away completely. Maybe Scout just needed to get that out of his system and he's fine now. Scout hops down off of the bed, scampering around the room and nosing at Anders' dirty socks.

"He looks so much better," Alec comments, getting out of bed and dressed.

Anders bobs his head. "I can still stay if you need me here."

"No, no, there's sick people who need you."

"Let's compromise," Anders offers. "I'll go, and be back in two or three hours, okay?"

"Sounds good."

Anders dresses and leaves. Alec spends some time playing with Scout, who still seems to lack stamina but who no longer looks at all sick. Eventually Scout tires, and goes to lie down in the upstairs hallway, between Alec's bedroom and his mother's room – or what had been his mother's room before her death.

Scout lays on his side again, but his breathing is still even. Alec sits by him to keep him company, so grateful that the dog is getting better that the seizure takes him by complete surprise.

It isn't as dramatic as a human seizure, perhaps, and it's eerily quiet. Scout's head snaps back, spine arching backwards, paws stretched straight out and shaking. The only sounds are Scout's toenails clicking against the tile floor and Alec's sudden sob.

Scout stills, and stops breathing.

The scream tears out of Alec's throat before he can stop it, tears and snot running down his face in inelegant, uncontrollable rivers, arms tightening around Scout's still, unmoving body. And then Scout sighs, shifts, and inhales suddenly. It's like a resurrection, leaving Alec feeling weak and wrung out.

"Please don't do that don't scare me like that please, Scout, don't leave me, please, get better, get better, don't leave me please…"

The pleading and begging is punctuated only by Scout's shuddering, laborious breathing and Alec using a dirty sock to wipe his nose. It isn't the best solution, but it would be disrespectful to get snot on his best friend of more than ten years.

Several more times, Scout stops breathing. Each time he pauses fifteen, twenty seconds, and then inhales sharply. Alec has learned by now to keep an ear to the dog's ribs. If he can still hear a heartbeat thundering inside, then Scout is still alive.

It doesn't stop him from screaming himself hoarse every time, however. By this time he's done begging for Scout not to die. Now he just wants his best friend to have some peace.

Eventually, Anders returns from the clinic. Two hours, almost to the minute. He's up the stairs without any delay. He brings a bowl of water with him, which Scout manages to drink. The constant drooling has resumed, and apparently dehydrated him badly.

"Maybe he'll be stronger if he eats?" Anders suggests. Alec suspects it's less to do with actually feeding Scout and more to do with giving Alec something to do so he doesn't feel as helpless as all that. "Here, I'll sit with him. You go. Plain chicken, just like last night."

Alec doesn't want to leave his friend. Wants less to be helpless. He finally nods and relinquishes his position to Anders and heads downstairs to the kitchen to sort through Bodahn's meticulous organizing. The chicken proves difficult to find, ten minutes is entirely too long to be gone from Scout's side – and that's just to find it. Cutting it into little chunks takes longer. By the time he has the plate ready he's running back.

He hears death before he sees it, a horrid sort of mechanical inhale every fifteen seconds, as if it is some kind of dwarven machine breathing for his dog and not his dog. Harsh, artificial. Anders looks up sadly.

"His heart stopped not long after you went downstairs. I don't know how he's still breathing."

Alec drops the plate, lets it shatter against the floor, and skids to his knees next to Scout, cradling the massive head in his hands and placing a kiss between half-lidded eyes. "It's okay Scout, it's okay, just be at peace, it's okay, you can go now…"

Just as he trails off, Scout inhales one last, awful time, head curling unnaturally, open mouth pressed to the floor, and just sighs.

And then it's over.

Sobbing, Alec hugs Scout's head – the head that has always smelled strangely like grape jelly for no discernible reason – and fills the silence of death with the gut-wrenching realization that he has no deity to pray to for Scout's soul.

Atheism occasionally has its drawbacks. One of them is the utter lack of comfort when something like this happens.

"I'm so sorry, love. He knew you loved him, though, and he didn't go alone."

Alec reins in his sobs, blowing his nose on the dirty sock he's been using. "You're a good dog, Scout," he murmurs brokenly, voice thick and nasal with tears and snot. "You're the best dog that ever is, was, or will be. Anders…could you, could you sit with him? I need to get a, a sheet or something…I don't want him to be alone."

Anders nods, kindly refraining from mentioning that Scout is dead and wouldn't know company from alone. Alec stumbles off to his bedroom, digging through his linen armoire until he finds a sheet strong enough to bear the weight of a dead mabari.

He sets it next to Scout's cooling body, laid out straight and slightly crumpled, more like a rope than a sheet.

"Here, help me roll him up this way."

They roll Scout up on one side, slide the sheet partially under him, gently let his weight fall back down. Sliding the sheet the rest of the way under isn't difficult from there.

"I'd forgotten the rules," Alec says while they work. "I watched my father die too. Wasting illness. He looked his healthiest right before he died. I just needed to believe Scout was getting better, and I forgot…"

"Hush, love. You did all you could. I think…I think he may have had something wrong with him from birth. And by the time he even starts to look sick from that, not even magic…there was nothing you could do except what you did." Anders finishes adjusting the sheet on his end, and gathers up the corners to make a rope of sorts. Alec mirrors him, and they soon have a sling to carry Scout in. "What do you, I mean, bollocks…"

"I'd thought to take him out to the Wounded Coast, somehow," Alec answers softly. "It just seems like a good place. It isn't Ferelden, of course, but for ashes…"

"Ah. Maybe we can borrow a cart from somewhere to get him out there?"

In the end it's what they do. Alec sits with Scout while Anders heads up to the Viscount's Keep to borrow a small supply cart from Aveline and the guards. Aveline isn't fond of Anders but she harbors no such ill will toward Hawke or Scout and lends Anders the cart, telling him to pass on her condolences to Alec. Alec, in the meantime, finger-combs Scout's raised fur into some semblance of order.

Anders has the cart right outside the Amell estate's front door and the front door wide open when Alec looks up from trying to make his dead friend look presentable. It takes both men a lot of time and effort to get Scout down the stairs. Mabari are heavy, dead mabari more so, and in the end Alec and Anders are a pair of mages, not sword-slingers.

It breaks Alec's heart, seeing the way Scout bunches up in the sheet when they move him. It makes him look alive. Several times he thinks he sees the hound move, or breathe, and he has to forcibly remind himself that his dog is dead.

The journey out to the Wounded Coast is bleak. Not for the weather or for the danger – the bandits and beasts are conspicuously absent and not a cloud is in the sky. But Alec is either sobbing or trying not to the whole way, and Anders is a little misty-eyed himself.

He isn't a dog person, but Scout was special.

They find a cove that suits them some hours after noon. They lift Scout out of the cart and set him on a large, flat boulder. Alec peels the sheet away from the mabari's face, kissing the dog's nose and eyebrows one last time, and then the top of his head.

It hurts, knowing he won't ever smell this peculiar grape-jelly smell anymore, will never hear Scout snoring. He even misses Scout's gas.

Better breathing out of both ends than neither, he'd told Anders once. He'd meant it.

Futilely, he checks for a heartbeat and breathing one last time. He finds neither.

Stepping back, Alec folds himself into Anders' waiting arms, appreciating the support, the calm, that Anders has held onto his mind so long just to be here. Cheek resting against a feathered shoulder, Alec takes a breath, steels himself, and calls fire down onto the boulder. Anders' magic is with him, helping him control it, because it's hard to focus.

That's his best friend he's burning.

A natural fire might take longer to reduce a full-grown mabari warhound to dust, but this is magic, magic burning with the rage and intensity of grief. Alec calls on one last spell, using force magic to blast the ashes and embers out over the water, letting the sea carry Scout away.

"That hound saved my soul," Alec mumbles into Anders' coat, unable to watch the embers die on the waves. "Father dead and I had no one left I could talk to, no one I could be weak in front of, because Mother and the twins needed so much from me. And that was Father's last wish, you know? Command, really. He ordered me to take care of them no matter what. And then here comes this half-grown mabari pup, all ribs and expecting to be kicked, and he just sticks to me."

Anders rubs Alec's back, lets him ramble.

"And then we lost Bethy just out of Lothering, and Carver in the Deep Roads, and Mother to that…that man, and I still had Scout. Scout, the one who really believed in me, always knew how to make me feel better no matter what. I don't know how I'm going to sleep without him snoring, Anders, I just…I just don't know how!"

"It'll get better," Anders murmurs, resting his chin on Alec's head. "Eventually you'll look back and just think of all the good times you had with him, and you won't feel so hurt by the loss."

Alec willfully ignores the duality of Anders' statement – he knows his lover is up to something, but now isn't the time for that – and settles in closer, because Anders is offering comfort and Alec is, for the moment, not proud enough to turn him down.

"I just…built my entire existence around Scout. I honestly don't know how to live without him."

He's planned everything around Scout since the hound was a half-starved pup that randomly showed up one day. The food he eats is all dog-healthy, he knows it's safe to sleep when he hears Scout snoring, he copes with his problems by walking, walking, usually with Scout at his side, and now?

Eventually he'll get to it. Walking. Working his emotions out through his feet until he's comfortably numb and this feeling of rawness fades away. Eventually he'll re-learn how to live without Scout by his side.

They walk back to Kirkwall with the empty cart, return it to Aveline, walk straight into another conflict between Knight Commander Meredith and First Enchanter Orsino. Both leaders immediately demand Alec's attention.

And the world marches brutally on. Eventually Alec will have time to grieve, but that day is not this day.

* * *

><p><span>In Loving Memory<span>

_Ranger - ?2001-9/3/2011_

_You'll never be forgotten, love._

* * *

><p><strong>AN: There's a cardinal rule of writing - never get personally invested in what you write. But my Rottweiler, Ranger, just passed today. This isn't an exact retelling. But I thought I'd translate her into Dragon Age verse. A tribute, of sorts. Also, a warning to all of you out there who are dog owners or are taking care of sick humans: Be wary of sudden returns to near-perfect health. It usually means that their time is up.**

**Sorry to anyone who's waiting for me to update my other works, but I can't write until reality gets a little less stark and jagged. It's hard to think without the sound of her snoring, you know?**


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